I hate to jump in but I really feel the need to correct the below. You have a good number of points wrong.
On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 10:38:49AM +0200, Daniel Kobras wrote: > On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 09:52:28AM +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote: > > I really feel we should get rid of all these static libraries. Who uses > > static linking now that even our glibc doesn't support it correctly > > across versions? > > People who want their binaries to run across different Linux machines. Dynamic linking to an old version of glibc is more portable than statically linking to any version. Exhibit A is NSS; exhibit B is iconv. Neither works properly when statically linked unless run against the exact same glibc version. > People who don't want to keep up with rapidly changing library APIs. That's a good reason to statically link to _specific_ libraries. > People who want to have reliable emergency recovery tools available. This is not hard to arrange using shared libraries. > People who use performance critical libs on register-starved machines. Another good reason for specific static libraries only. > People who need to minimize startup times. Static linking does _not_ minimize startup times; in fact it's quite inefficient. Dynamic linking + prelinking is much faster if you care about startup times. > To name but a few. Just because there's little incentive to use static > linkage when building Debian packages doesn't mean that we should > deprecate it. Unless you're willing to convince the admin of the > beowulf cluster next door to install libyoddafoo on several hundred > nodes for me. Not that I'm disagreeing with your conclusions; just your reasoning. -- Daniel Jacobowitz MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer